If you have a flash drive and an external disk you can boot into Rescuezilla (a disk cloning/backup/restore distribution) using the flash drive, save/backup your OS disk as an image in the external disk, and restore it as needed. After restoration, you will have your OS disk as it was at the time you saved it.
Linux
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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If you want to test out Linux, try running a virtual machine instead. There are a few good free software programs to do this. VirtualBox used to be a good option. It's a free and harmless way to dive into Linux.
So I will get some flack from this I am sure but my daily drivers since about 2004 are Linux I have always had a Mac laptop up to a few years ago in that time frame and Windows work laptops.
Honestly Windows 11 has a lot of nice creature features that KDE has had for a while and with WSL I can use a lot of my Linux commands. Can tell you how many times I have used egrep for things along with having native ssh built in. Powershell is a very powerful shell language especially if you want to go down the .Net rabbit hole but that’s not usually needed
Still my main desktop is Debian stable with distrobox for apps I need more modern versions of. But it’s not hard to switch back and forth
Do a dual boot, that's what I did. If after some time you feel like the windows partition is unnecessary, delete it. If after deletion it suddenly seems to become necessary, it is always possible to reinstall windows, there are tutorials online on how to do that.
When I first wanted to try Linux out I made a small 50gb partition for it. the logic was that this was the size of just one game and it was an entire operating system, so I wasn't losing much. As I continued to use Linux I kept expanding that partition to correspond with the priority I gave the OS.
Just buy a new SSD to install Linux on. If you decide to switch back just plug the old one in.
If you could install the linux then you can re-install the windows